Communication links between two computers on a network, such as the Internet or a local-area network, are subject to various types of degradation and failure conditions. Protocol analysis is frequently used to determine where potential problems exist in a network. Each network protocol requires the development of a protocol interpreter designed around the characteristics of a particular protocol. Because a network may implement one or more of the over 430 communication protocols currently in common use, a general purpose protocol analysis system must incorporate many individual protocol interpreters.
Although the characteristics of each protocol are different, certain operations in performing protocol analysis are common, such as parsing a protocol data unit to extract a payload. Having a generalized base model for the common operations would save development time in creating the protocol interpreters and reduce the complexity of a general purpose protocol analysis system.